


diamonds on playing cards

by earlofcardigans



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-21
Updated: 2012-12-21
Packaged: 2017-11-21 22:58:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/603010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/earlofcardigans/pseuds/earlofcardigans
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint and Natasha talk about what happened and what they will do with their future.</p>
            </blockquote>





	diamonds on playing cards

**Author's Note:**

  * For [melonbutterfly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/melonbutterfly/gifts).



Natasha is like a book with the spine cracked, severed. First few chapters ripped out, author obscured. But you read the book anyway to get to the end, even though it's not happy.

The cover is still beautiful and deep.

She's like a rhombus. Perfect sides. Tipped over gracefully. Parallel to the ground, to the sky, running straight lines for miles.

Natasha is not easy to know, but it's too easy to love her.

Clint has been on the same path, following her fluttering pages or her guided lines for longer than he can remember. There are only a handful of people that he can say he loves without hesitation.

For the longest time, there were only two, and everyone questioned his first choice.

Maybe even Natasha, he’s not sure. He’s never sure. He doesn’t ask her the big questions.

Not that he has to. She’ll tell him the big answers anyway.

Like now that they are finally alone, washed clean from the street grime and alien mess and blood that Clint fears is mostly other people’s, now they get to sit close enough to touch, even though they aren’t, can’t, and figure it out.

“Why, Natasha? Are you still?” Clint has asked her twice already. Why was she compromised? What did Loki take from her?

She has only said, in ways woven around the truth, that she’s fine now. She says it again, “I’m not now. That was a battle. We fought, we won against magic, we were soldiers. We’re going home again.”

“I don’t know if I have a home anymore.”

Natasha doesn’t touch him. Specifically avoids touching him. Her first two fingers twitch, but she doesn’t reach out. Reaching out would mean she lied.

Clint knows she lied, is lying, will lie to him again and again. It’s the one thing he’s come to trust from her the most. It’s the most constant thing in his life. And like a book with a twist somewhere where there shouldn’t be one, he’s come to enjoy it.

Everyone lies. Natasha’s just mean the most to him.

And most of the time, he’ll even be thankful. But not this one. This time calls for the truth.

She’s the only thing he can see in his head that isn’t tinged blue and bursting out silver around the edges. She’s the only thing that is still as bright as it was before.

He doesn’t know what that means. He does know he can’t close his eyes alone. Too afraid of the starbursts of another person’s footprints.

He wonders, idly, if this is how Natasha feels every day.

“You always have a home. They wouldn’t have. _I_ wouldn’t have let them take you. And I think I’m not the only one now. You made friends.”

She touches him then, the first time since the battle where she allowed him to pull her up. She rocks into him in a way he knows he taught her, pushes their shoulders together, her arm stiff, his too loose to do any good.

“You know I don’t need more than one.” He tries for light and fails.

“Well now I think we all do.” She is whispering. She doesn’t whisper. She told him once that all you have to do is drop your voice low, you’ll still be heard, no need for the strange hissing sounds.

Clint thinks maybe she doesn’t know she even did it, dropped her voice out, said those words. He won’t ask, so she won’t have to tell him another lie to save him.

He’s told her before he’s beyond saving; he was when they found him, when Coulson put him together the correct way, when he tried so hard to be the better person, especially now. It always feels like a mask somehow.

“Are you going to tell me?” He tries again. Just in case she’s fallen off her axis, her right angles fallen in on themselves.

She shakes her head hard, once to the left. Some of her hair gets stuck to her lips. He gets there first, brushes it back, trails his fingers, callused and bruised, up the side of her face. He pushes until she looks at him again.

“It’s not about you.”

Clint tries to form the words that tell her that she is about him, she’s the only good thing left about him, but she shakes her head again, once, hard, to the other side.

He watches her eyes. She’s deadlier than he ever thought about being. He shouldn’t push, she’ll push back harder and with more bite to draw blood.

He’ll bleed for her. If she asks him. If it will make something snap so all he sees is red coating the inside of his useless brain. If he sees red, he sees Natasha slide down the sides, take up residence again, run her lines straight through him, tattoo her typewriter words over everything ugly.

“He. He took something from me. From all of us. But it’s not only about you. Not for me.” She digs her nails into his thigh so he’ll have something to use to remember her words. “He took the only stable thing I have here. He took you. Don’t ask me again.”

Clint has seen Natasha cry for a mark. He’s seen her mourn death in the only way she’s knows. He’s seen her completely beaten and still laughing.

He’s never seen this look on her face. Not like this, not for him. Its openness is more dangerous than anything else he’s seen.

He has never felt like looking at Natasha was looking into a mirror, an image flipped inside out so his soul was standing in front of him in a way he never expected to see it. Neither of them is that romantic.

What he saw, when he defied his orders and decided not to kill her until she killed him, was a promise. The one no one ever made him.

“I can’t give you that.” Clint closes his hand around hers so she’ll have something to hold onto when she remembers his words. “You’re the only thing between me and running. Coulson-“

“Coulson’s dead. He can’t stop you making bad decisions anymore.” Natasha turns completely away from him, hides the lie.

“I know you don’t believe that.” He still has her hand.

“I know you just want someone to give you new parameters.” She takes her hand back. “You can’t run. You can’t.”

Clint gets up, tired of sitting, tired of idling, tired of arguing.

He leans against the wall and can see her face in the reflection of the crisscrossed window beside her.

“You’re my parameters now.”

She looks up at him, caught off guard, too caught up to hide from him. He rarely gets that. She’s read ahead to the end of her story, there are no surprises in her sky.

“If I run, you tell me where and how far and how fast.” He holds his hands out to her. “I run with you.”

Natasha takes his hands, curls her fingers around his, light, frail, deceptive.

“I don’t want to run.” She pulls herself to him. “I want to be a soldier, I want us to be what everyone thinks of us.”

“No abandoning the cause.” Clint nods.

He wanted her to say that. He knows now she always would.

“No abandoning each other.”

Clint wraps his arms around her waist, holds on to all the curves that make her parallel lines even more dangerous.

“And that means everyone now.” She breathes through her words in a way that is never truly her. But Clint knows the meaning behind it. She’s given it to him so many times, shoved it into his hands in the most dangerous of situations.

“We can do this.” And Clint understands that he’s lying to himself only in the respect that he needs her to believe that he can still do it, that he can believe in himself, too.

“Are we building?” She runs her fingertips, slow and light, over his cheekbone where there is an old scar under the fresh hurt.

“No.” She pulls back to look into his eyes. He doesn’t blink. “This time, no fresh starts. Let’s take it all with us.”

“They aren’t going to be happy about that.”

She’s right. She’s always right. That’s the beauty of her contradiction.

“If they are our friends like you say, they’ll want us to leave it all with them anyway.”

She kisses him then, something slow and red, salt-tinged and all his.

He gives her back all her own words to write or rewrite an ending, the only thing he knows they can both fall into and keep.

Clint knows they aren’t parallel lines, never meeting, nor are they one intersection, meeting and falling away.

Natasha is his spiral. And he’ll keep going up until they both make it to the other side.


End file.
